The Five Habits Izzie Stevens Can't Seem to Break
by StarletOfTheForest
Summary: “Because she believes that if no one’s watching, nothing counts. Perhaps that’s the reason for the mess her life’s become.” Five short drabbles on the life of Izzie Stevens. No particular time period.


**The Five Habits Izzie Stevens Can't Seem to Break**

Biting her nails.

She knows it's gross, it's unclean, it's a bad habit. But it's one, that time after time, she can't stop doing. She's heard that it signifies nervousness, fright, but for her, it's just something to pass the time, something she does idly.

[She can hear her mother's voice in her head, still as shrill and grating as ever, "Now, Isobel, stop that. No man wants a girl with ragged nails. Why, your Aunt Kathy chipped a nail chewing hers!..."]

An escape. That's all she needs. Her delicate surgeon's hands might be ruined, but that's okay. The surgical gloves cover everything up.

Incessant baking, whenever something goes wrong.

She bakes muffins whenever someone dies.

[The name Denny resounds in her head and she instinctively blocks it out, like she always does.]

Chocolate is for whenever she feels sad, which has been happening a lot lately. Bitterness dissolves the tears, or so she hopes. Vanilla when she's angry; the sticky sweetness helps diminish the infuriation.

The smell of freshly-baked goods helps calm her down, and she wonders when she's going to stop needing baking to indirectly solve all her problems.

Binge eating.

She's not one of those girls with an eating disorder. She's a former model, for God's sake. Models starve themselves; they don't overeat. But that doesn't stop her from reaching into the fridge and devouring everything she touches, no matter if she happens to eat an entire tub of butter along the way. It's something to do with her life, besides wallowing.

The calories don't matter, anyways.

[Because she believes that if no one's watching, nothing counts. Perhaps that's the reason for the mess her life's become.]

Incessant cleaning.

Because even though it's not her house, it's her home.

[Nothing is really hers anymore.]

So she spends her one night off in the past week cleaning, furiously vacuuming the carpet, which wasn't even all that dirty anyway. She scrubs hysterically at the granite countertops, erasing the imaginary stains and her all-too-real pain.

She used to be the good little Catholic girl. Now that she feels too dirty to even step foot in a church, so this is her form of makeshift atonement.

She cleans, and a cloud of self-hatred and self-pity clings to her.

[How did she used to call herself selfless, when all she really cares about are her own problems?]

The other question she ponders about herself: how many escapes does one person need?

Alex Karev.

He's always been her fall-back boy.

When her first choice wasn't available (or dead, or married, she thinks harshly to herself) he was there: a comforting presence, a warm body. Sex, when she needed it. Someone who tolerated her when she went crazy, which happened rather often.

She used him too much. Every time she left him for someone else, he became a little bit more damaged, his heart a little more fragmented, his attitude a little more bitter and cruel. He's only fallen in love once, and she kept abandoning him.

What she didn't realize is that she'd fallen for him too, somewhere along the way, somewhere in between the fiancé she killed and the marriage she ruined and all the other shit she'd managed to cause in less than two years.

[She can't help but think this cancer ravaging her body is some extreme form of karma.]

Breaking this habit would be hard to do, harder than all the rest, if it wasn't for the fact that the habit was now something tangible and permanent.

Reality. For once, it wasn't something to deal with, to endure, but something to embrace and love.

For her, he was the real thing, the love of her life, the one she wanted to spend each and every day with, and all the rest of those horribly cheesy clichés, the ones she'd never thought she'd actually want to apply to someone.

She really couldn't wait to get out of this hospital bed and introduce him to people as "Alex Karev, my husband."

Author's Note: So I kind of screwed up the verb tenses. Whatever. A sort of return to fanfiction, even though my writing is pretty bad... and I don't like how the last one turned out. Oh well. Reviews make my life complete. :D


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